Words matter. These are the best Michael Emerson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I’ve been blessed by doing classic plays on Broadway, which was one of my great dreams forever.
Yeah, it’s funny, working on a show with as large a cast as we have here, your work gets sort of compartmentalized. There’s still about half the cast that I’ve never had a scene with but I have missed working with Terry.
I’m truly glad there are so many options on television that are for grown and thinking people.
I’d really like to play a character who’s inarticulate. I always play people with language. It would be good to play a mute or a fool or a saint.
I liked dark, urban stories like ‘Peter Gunn,’ which was a detective series on network TV when I was a little boy. I grew up in a farmtown in the Midwest where not much exciting happened. I liked the idea of lives lived at night and the shadowy characters who lived in that demi-monde.
I like the things every actor likes – I like great, intense duet scenes with good actors.
I like shooting on location in New York City.
I was a magazine illustrator for many years before I became an actor, and I used to think, ‘Oh, God, all those wasted years!’ But now I think it’s just been one big enterprise of illustrating. I used to do it with colored pencils, and now I do it with this voice and this set of limbs.
As an actor, I’m not sure what I had to offer the world of tragedy and comedy when I was 21. I hadn’t lived a whole lot. By my middle 30s, you know, I had been knocked around a little bit.
I used to make training films for the U.S. government. I was always cast as a madman or a prisoner. I once played a prisoner who was holding himself hostage with a razor blade.
I’m very proud of my New York debut. I played Oscar Wilde in ‘Gross Indecency’ off Broadway in about 1997. And I was very proud of my Broadway debut in ‘The Iceman Cometh.’
‘Elementary’ is a strong show; we watch it almost religiously in our house.
I think of myself as a problem-solver. I want to go in and help the director and the writer to get the best they can out of the text they’re working with.
One of the first roles I every played, I was Grandpa Vanderhoff in ‘You Can’t Take It With You.’ Walked with a cane, white stuff in my hair. It must have been horrible. Thank God there’s no videotape of it.
One of the things I like about performing on the stage is that it is a kind of meditative experience. Time does stand still. You have no concept or feeling of the passing of two or three hours’ time. It’s all kind of one present moment, which is a kind of a description of meditation.
I’m the worst at a computer.
I have had some good fortune in the world of television. I have had it late in life after many youthful struggles and a change of careers.
